Canon SD1100IS Digital Macro and Macro Mode Exploring

I'd just been learning the controls of our new Canon SD 1100 IS when I discovered CHDK, the Canon Hackers Development Kit.

This firmware hack liberates the Canon Powershots, enabling more features. One of those features is the ability to use a flash with digital macro. I am just beginning to explore.


First, two photos of the swimming sea anemone Boloceroides sp. outside the World Resort on Saipan.
The first is to show just how small this object is.

The second is taken hand held using digital macro mode and a flash, though in truth I cannot remember the exact camera settings.



A third photo was made with straight Macro Mode, handheld, at a low tide, without a camera housing. Star sand is something of a curiosity and many of my students have told me they have heard of Star Sand on Tinian.
Fewer realize that it is also found---and indeed even a predominant member of the reef flat community---on Saipan as well. At certain beaches, over 90% of the sand of the beach is made of these shells. Shells of what? An amoeba! Who'd've thought he's see an amoeba?!

This amoeba is a foraminiferan, a shell forming amoeba, and furthermore is a "Large Coral Reef Foraminiferan". Large Coral Reef forams (as they are called in short) have symbiotic plant cells living inside them. Many of them have Zooxanthellae, like corals do, photosynthesizing Dinoflagellates that give extra Carbon (food, sugar) to the host. Others, like this Baculogypsina sphaerulata, have symbiotic naked diatoms that fill the same role.



Want to see what's inside one of these stars? Here's a shot taken for a student's science fair project, of a decalicified Baculogypsina sphaerulata. This shot was taken with the same Canon Powershot "point and shoot," held by hand up to the eyepiece of a microscope. The in-scope magification was 200 power.

Radical Lexicon: "Force the Thunk"

"Force the Thunk": I have seen this term several times on the org-mode mailing list. Here is are a few snippets from the Jargon List (hacker's dictionary, installable with apt-get on Ubuntu GNU/Linux installations). These are definitions for "thunk", with a hiistorical note at the end. I must preface these: I have no idea what this is all about. I can code a little simple lisp, but this involves, I think, run time composition of code, something list is known for. (Or NOT.) I am intrigued, and I hope to figure out how this works.


1. [obs.]"A piece of coding which provides an address:", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk which computes the expression and leaves the address of the result in some standard location.

2. Later generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed (similar to what in techspeak is called a closure). The process of unfreezing these thunks is called forcing.

5. A person or activity scheduled in a thunklike manner. "It occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk --I frequently need to be forced to completion.:" -- paraphrased from a {plan file}.


Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths circulating about the origin of this term. The most common is that it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another holds that the sound is that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet another suggests that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to the inventors, it was coined after they realized (in the wee hours after hours of discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60 could be figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought, simplifying the evaluation machinery. In other words, it had `already been thought of'; thus it was christened a thunk, which is "the past tense of `think' at two in the morning".

Running (and walking) without shoes

An article , linked by Slashdot.org addresses the need (or NOT) for running shoes. I am interested, as I was into the habit of using no shoes at all, in Chuuk. I scorched my feet pretty well on a midafternoon, walking up a highway in Kona Hawaii from the City of Refuge to Painted Church. After that, it was quite easy for me to walk barefoot anywhere. Gravel. Reef platforms (very difficult to do otherwise). I gradually built up thick soles on my feet.

In Chuuk, on the island of Tol, I walked daily to and from work, between Wonip Village and Foson, where I worked, almost always without shoes. Since leaving Chuuk some 14 years ago, I have probably lost a good amount of my callouses, but I can still walk in many situations without shoes. I was able to walk the rocky pathway over a mountain saddle after dark, on a moonless night, by feel. I wonder how I did that, even now. With shoes, I think it would be impossible.

This article mentions that the Stanford running team decided to train barefoot. Apparently the use of the most technologically advanced shoes caused most injuries.

In my case, I earlier had heel spurs, so I now use air-nikes. "Money won't change you, but time will take you out."

Doodling!

Doodling!

My Mother doodled, when she was at the phone.  Not drawings, IIRC.  To a certain extent, I picked up that habit, so when I saw this article about doodling on NPR, I saved the link.  Basically, the message is that doodling is not a distraction.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101727048

 

Here's to doodling!

Is it safe and feasible to buy eyeglasses online?

Not going to write much here. Here are some links I discovered in a search about buying eyeglasses online. I believe my eye doctor is doing right by me; but I can't afford 450.00 for a new prescription. My last new eyeglasses were built into the same old titanium frames, but they are moving on also. Is it safe to do this?

One of the most helpful sources was an article in the New York Times: Do it YOurself Eyeglass Shopping On the Internet. Before I found this, I noticed that many google hits were to online sales sites from the UK. The following are sites that seem at least interesting.

• 39-DollarGlasses.com
• Goggles4U
• FramesDirect.com
• Eyeglasses.com (now dysfunctional, but mentioned in the NYT article)

Essential link: GlassyEyes Blog. (Note later: This blog is amazing, with fine and useful comments. Great service to humanity.)

Now I have some fat to chew on.

Added Later: Here's another link: Eyeglass Liquidators . One post on the blog above mentioned they do trifocals, while others didn't.

Looking for Stainless Steel Staples

All of a Sunday Morning, I was a-searching about on the Internet for stainless steel staples. What did I find? I found Found the Early Office Museum . Monel staples are used in the archival departments of museums and libraries. 

Found a good discussion of archival document fastening at the U. S. National Archives. Another page listed supplies. Very good stuff. 

Stainless paper clips are de rigeur. 

A search led me to an old friend, I will not link to here---Light Impressions---for Archival treatment of photos. That's an expensive process. My family threw away several boxes including negatives that I had stored in special archival materials, that had never been printed of my first trip to Majuro and Kiribati. In particular, my first experiments in black and white in-water photography. 

Another page on the Office Museum site covers early Staplers, Paper Fasteners, Paper Clips. I am interested in the "paper welder." I have actually seen a broken one on Saipan, and I saw one once in Santa Barbara at an office supply, in Goleta. But I can't find on on ebay! They are just off the map on the Inet. Except at the Office Museum, where pictures can be found. There do exist paperless staplers that punch holes and loop and piece through to bind paper. Perhaps just as good? And cheap. Here's one on Think Geek. 

Monel Staples on Gaylord Supplies (library, archive, furniture, etc.) were about US$30-40.00 a box. One site was a bit cheaper. Interestingly, the mainstream staple producers produce monel staples only for staple guns and large, heavy duty staplers. Same for stainless. That's a pricey little corner of the universe to shop in. Anti-Entropy doesn't come cheap. 

 Thomas is the place to find manufacturers.

Open Access: One more link

Good introduction to a number of related topics. Terra incognita Blog, at Penn State: Open Access Jounral Literature is an Open Educational Resource

Free, Open, Cheap Textbooks

Textbooks. 21st Century Textbooks. I can't even start to express myself upon this topic. Stumbled upon these links today:

Open Text Book: Something of a clearing house: many links, including this one:

Bayanihan Book Project in the Philippine Islands. "to increase the quality and availability of high school textbooks." Currently said to have two books available. Textbooks sold in the PI for college students are often printed on pulp, often years or decades out of date. The only copy of Campbell's Biology at Silliman University Library was 2 editions out of date, and had been read so many times, was so severely dog-eared, that it had swollen to twice it's native thickness.

I once was privileged that a copy of an Oxford University Press Biology textbook for Africa crossed my path: this book was extremely cheap, and highly relevant to the African experience. Here's a Free High School Science Texts project in Capetown, SA.

I remember CALPIRG, from my days at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The best of the advocacy groups. CalPIRG is campaigning for affordable textbooks. Their mission statement:

When corporate wrongdoing threatens our health or our safety, or violates fundamental principles of fairness and justice, CALPIRG stands up for the public. We conduct investigative research. We publish consumer reports and exposes. We advocate new laws and other protections at the local, state and federal levels. And when necessary, we take corporate wrongdoers to court. Our results-oriented approach has won victories for Californians on a wide range of issues, including healthcare reform, prescription drug pricing, consumer privacy and product safety.

Today, an item on Slashdot showcases several projects: Competition in the Free Textbook Market.

Microwulf: Supercomputer on the cheap

http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/211/1/1/1/

Nuts and bolts account. I dwell on building my next machine in this way, with perhaps only one Motherboard, or perhaps 2. What about shielding?

Medical Mysteries: Pig Brains

The Scientist : Manna from hell

Balkan endemic nephropathy seems to be aristolochic acid nephropathy and is contracted when minute amounts of the plant Aristolochia clematitis. A chinese medicinal herb, Aristolochia fanghi is an ingredient in Chinese herbal medicines that have also been associated with kidney cancer.

The Scientist : Manna from hell

How a US-Croatian team confirmed that poisoned bread causes a kidney disease endemic to the Balkans - and verified that the same toxic ingredient was in herbal supplements used around the world.

Persistence pays off! These guys methodically put together a study drawing on Molecular Biology, Agro Ecology, Epidemiology. Toxicology. An intriguing international tale.

Hackzine

I like toys. These hacks are cool.

Gleaned on a Sunday

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/index.html
Evolutionary Psychology

The Edge:
The world question center: What is your formula?

Cumaceans of the World!

Posed as a question: Why are scientists the last to think of GNU/Linux. Ironic.

This escellent site about Cumaceans gives access to a key to Cumacea using the IntKey software that is not useable except by Windoze:

Intkey Dataset

If you already have Intkey installed in your computer, click here to download the cumaceans of the world dataset (2.4MB ZIP). Click here to download Gynodiastylida species dataset (17.2MB ZIP).

To use these datasets, simply download the zip files and extract them to your hard drive. Open Intkey and point to the initiation file in the directory.

Downloading and using Intkey

To retrieve information, you need the program Intkey and data files. Download the program first. It is recommended that you install the current version of Intkey. You must have Windows 95/98/ME, NT, 2000 or XP. Using these platforms, Intkey can read the data files from the Internet, and afterwards save them on your hard disk.
Please use Internet Explorer only

All the Colors of the Rainbow, Now Only $18.99

This in an email offer. I've gotta think of something to write about this. Can't.

Life Logs: a future found object

I found this readable ramble by science fiction writer Charlie Stross, on the future, making "flogs"---"Life Logs, recording every nuance of a human's life in digital form. Surprizingly it didn't seem as threatening in his hands. Maybe that's the true threat.

Back to no electricity. I hear many on Saipan are now doing without, though not through personal choice.